"Since 2003, Mark
Cameron Boyd has been creating paintings with words, which were initially based
on his own writings. Since then he has appropriated texts from a variety of
sources, including Derrida, Nana Last,
Rosalind Krauss,
and most recently, Thomas Aquinas. On a variety of surfaces, usually wood or
wood painted to resemble a blackboard, or even glass, he writes sentences
across horizontal pieces of tape laid on the surface. He then peels the tape
away, leaving half of the words, and sentences floating in a field…

His text bisections subvert
the process and idea of language as signification. Although viewers are invited
to participate in completing the words, there is always room for error and
creativity. In fact, the paintings depend upon the creative input of the
audience. The meanings of his statements are suspended and incomplete, left
open to play and to change…

His interest in semiotics,
the interrelation of word and image, and the process of making meaning in art
and language, falls within the tradition of conceptual art and the ‘linguistic
turn’ in American art criticism and art history of the late 1970s and
throughout the 1980s. However, what began as a simple transcription of random
thoughts experienced during art-making has evolved into actions upon the text,
in particular the text bisection, which undermine the conventional meanings of
the words at same time that his writings have become more complex and
theoretical meditations on the nature of art, subjectivity, and the process of
signification.”